Blue Fire Dawn is on the backburner because making human shaped art is bloody expensive and I can’t afford it.

Fortunately all the work that went into BFD has not gone to waste and it has formed the basis for my new currently Untitled Game (OK it has a title but it’s awful and I don’t want to use it).

Untitled Game is another top-down shmup using a similar art style to Waves (because money) but with a totally different focus. While Waves is all about high scores this game is all about Power Ups and exploration.

It’s a blend of top-down shooting and tweaking your loadout played out in procedurally generated levels.

Currently the game is what I call Pre-Alpha as I’m still building all of the various systems needed to be able to populate the game with stuff but it is playable.

Here is a montage of the 4 types of weapon currently available:

From top left to bottom right: Beam Laser, Shotgun, Flamethrower, Rocket Launcher.

These are just test weapons that I made to test the weapon framework. It’s quite robust and flexible now allowing me to do a lot of different things and chain effects together.

As an example:

A Weapon can fire a random number of exploding projectiles in an arc between 0 and 360 degrees. An exploding projectile can create any number of new actors when it hits something including more exploding projectiles, enemies, explosions etc.

Any source of damage (bullets, explosions etc) can apply status effects to their target that can buff or debuff the target (setting it on fire with the flamethrower for example). These effects can be refreshed by applying them again and can even do things like periodically explode, spawn enemies etc.

So I could create a weapon that fires a projectile that does no direct damage but causes any enemy it hits to explode after a short countdown which damages nearby enemies and covers them in a goo that slows them down and slowly eats away at their health.

I’ve already done a weapon whose bullets create 8 new copies of themselves when they hit something. It crashed the game in just a few seconds.

One problem that I’ve got now is the system is so flexible that while I could create almost anything I am overwhelmed by the potential. I don’t know where to start!

If you have any ideas for weapon types then I’d love to hear them in the comments.

This is something silly I put together quickly which I initially called “Pretentious mode” because of all the “Art” games that think having a substandard shooter is OK if all your sound effects are musical (It’s not. Do some work and make a good shooter as well).

It’s an audio setting not a new game mode where all the existing game sounds get replaced by a musical instrument playing a random note in the pentatonic scale. Depending on the length of the original sound it either plays a Glockenspiel, a piano or an ambient Lustmord-like drone.

It really highlights the 64 voice limit in Unreal which you can hit just by firing the gun at the arena wall so you should be getting about twice as many sounds playing when you get a big explosion but sadly the engine it says no.

Once I remember how to do Steam updates (it being over 7 months since the last one) I’ll probably throw this up as a free update for Waves which you’ll be able to access in the audio settings.

If you read this blog regularly then you should know that my next game will involve procedurally generated levels.

Well I’ve been working on that a fair bit recently with a specific focus on finding easy ways to add variation to the level art without adding to the generation algorithm.

This means I’ve spent the last week messing about with shaders. Hurrah!

Shaders are awesome because they are really good at procedural content – adding things like dirt, blood, damage etc over the entire level can be done in the shader without it accentuating the square tiles or seeing a repeat in the textures.

It also generates some pretty awesome wallpapers.

Here is a basic floor shader (Click for bigger):

Now here is that same shader but with some procedurally generated dirt:

Some areas of the dungeon are dirtier than others. This is the dirtiest spot I could find but in other areas you just get some scuffing or the cracks between the tiles have just a small amount of dirt accumulated.

You may have heard of Because We May by now but if not I shall explain what’s going on…

For the last week of May a whole bunch of independent game devs are celebrating the fact that we can do whatever the hell we want when it comes to pricing our games rather than having retail partners or big portals forcing us to charge certain prices and potentially screwing us over as a result. This means there are a whole bunch of awesome games on sale at reduced (and in a few case inflated) prices just because.

On Monday Waves sold it’s 15,000th copy during it’s Daily Deal on Steam. That’s not bad for a game that’s been out a little under 6 months and was made mostly by just one man.

So with 20k copies looking very far away indeed right now it seems like a good time for a look back at Waves to see what went right and what went wrong.

First up some statistics without any context:

Units sold to date: 15,238

Percentage sold direct: 3.7%

Percentage sold on Steam: 96.2%

Percentage sold in Steam bundles: 53%

Percentage sold during Daily Deal: 15%

Metacritic Score: 82

Steam Demo Downloads: 25,985

Steam Demo Conversion Rate: 6.8%

Average Time Played: 2 Hours 44 Minutes

Average Play Session: 22 Minutes

Percentage of Players who played more than 20 hours: 1%

Percentage of Players who reached the Score Cap: 0.4%

If you are a website looking for a story feel free to pick a headline out of those numbers although by now I don’t think there is anything that surprising about them as we all know that Steam is a pretty big deal these days.

As you can see the majority of sales have not been at the full asking price of $10. In fact the average price paid per unit is significantly south of that and I’m yet to reach the point where I have to pay Epic any royalties for my UDK license. In short I’m not rich but I’m not starving (I am however still living with my parents which helps even though it is embarrassing as a 30 year old man). Now on the assumption that the inevitable Summer and Winter Sales for this year bring in about half as much as the first Winter sale did I should be able to fund myself for the next year. Those same numbers however say that I won’t be able to afford to pay for lots of art or other content for my next game which sucks.

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Why Am I not Rich?

Everybody knows all indie developers that make it onto Steam are minted and have no money problems so why am I not sitting at a gold plated desk smoking money cigars while wearing a money hat (aside from my not smoking and looking daft in hats). Read on to find out why…

I’m implementing skill checks in BFD right now and got to wondering about dice probabilities. One of the things I wanted to try and avoid is using pure probability values in the belief that by using a dice based system people will have an easier time visualising what’s going on behind the scenes and can discuss it better. I also want to attract fans of tabletop gaming.

I have experience mostly with DnD and Games Workshops games and to be honest I always felt that both of them are lacking in opposite areas.

DnD (4e specifically) is as you hopefully know a D20 based game where your normal skill check is to roll a D20, add your modifiers to it and see if you beat the target skill. This results in some very large numbers being thrown around which can get a little confusing and having double the skill not always meaning you’re twice as likely to succeed.

GW games on the other hand prefer stats that only tend to range between 0 and 10 with 3’s being considered “average”. Most skill checks with their systems depend on looking up the two stats involved and finding a target value for a D6 roll. Normally if the two stats are equal then this would be a 4+ (50%) if your is 1 more than your opponents it’s a 3+ (66%) and if it’s more than double it’s a 2+ (83%).

I like the small stats of GW games but not the probability distribution. If I have double the weapon skill of my opponent I should be twice as likely to hit them (75%) and if I have triple their skill I should be twice as likely again (88%).

These values only come up when dealing with re-rolls though. A 4+ on one D6 with a Re-roll is a 75% chance of success (and with 2 re-rolls it’s 88%). So I could say that having double the skill of the target lets you reroll a failure and triple lets you reroll two failures. This sounds great but it makes having a slight 1 or 2 point advantage useless.

So I ask the tabletop playing public who have no doubt done the maths on this already: Is there a dice system that would give me the distribution I crave with the granularity needed?

As the topic says. Multiplayer is hard. If you are a games developer who has only ever made single player games before then you have absolutely no idea the headaches that are involved when you try to make a multiplayer one. They are many and painful.

I am of course talking about my new project “Blue Fire Dawn” and you would be forgiven for thinking that making a Turn Based game multiplayer would be easier than a real time one. It isn’t. With a real time game you can be quite sloppy – it doesn’t matter if you drop a couple of packets because there are so many small updates being sent every second that another one will be along any moment now. Turn based games on the other hand are all about synchronization. When a player tells the server that they want to do something they are usually sending a big long list of commands all at once which have the potential to arrive out of order at the server which has to put them into the right order. Then the server has to make sure what the client sent it is even legal before executing it, rolling dice and sending the results back to all the clients. There is a lot of waiting and validating going on that real time games don’t need to care about.

During an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun the Firaxis guy said that making XCOM was a huge scary project. This is a sentiment recently shared by the makers of Xenonauts. Now consider this: With what I’m working on now I could potentially make either of those games and I’m trying to make it work in Multiplayer. I’m clearly insane.

Here is the thing: It is working in multiplayer. About 3 weeks ago I had a rubbish prototype that worked in single player. Since then I have a rubbish prototype that works in multiplayer (with the exception of the revamped abilities system which I’ll get to). I’ve had to do lots of very boring things like login procedures, replication, lobbies and handling reconnecting clients (If you drop from a game and reconnect within 5 minutes then it’s as if nothing happened. Take longer than 5 minutes and your characters will disappear and everybody can continue playing) but the important thing is that it works. Levels are procedurally generated and match up between clients and everything updates correctly as things move around the world. It’s awesome.

I clearly haven’t hit the actual hard part of this game yet then. In fact I think I’ve just now run face first into it.

Firaxis and I have managed to independently come up with the same ability system for our games. Alternatively we have both managed to independently “borrow” ideas from 4th edition DnD (it’s this one – shhh). Your characters get a number of Action Points to spend each turn on abilities. Moving normally is an ability and costs 1AP. Shooting at a target is an ability and costs 1AP. Going on Overwatch is an ability and costs 1AP etc. You can do these in any order you want and so long as the ability doesn’t have a cooldown or use limit you can do them multiple times in the same turn.

It’s a bit like time units in UFO but instead of an ability being something tiny like turning 45 degrees or moving a grenade from your belt to your hand they encompass a goal or idea rather than the minutiae of how to achieve it. You’d think this would be easier to implement than Time Units but in reality it really isn’t. Time Units are probably the easiest method to make a Turn Based game entirely because they are so discrete.

Take my current head scratcher: The Charge ability.

Charging is conceptually simple – You can make a move for your full movement speed but it must end adjacent to an enemy who you will then attack in melee combat. In comparison to a regular Move or Melee Attack ability this is a tough one because it combines both of them into one. Add to this the fact that I don’t want to have to code every single ability in the game and have a lofty ideal of being able to assemble them as data and things become so very complicated.

I am also trying to decide whether to let players execute abilities one move at a time or if they have to send the entire plan in one go to the server. I know some people will really want to be able to agonise over each square moved just in case the next move reveals an enemy but there is a lot to be said for having to commit to a plan up front (with seeing an enemy allowing you to abort mid-move or continue – either way your action point is gone) and whatever I decide here can have a significant impact on how I design the abilities system and how it works in multiplayer.

In conclusion: Multiplayer is hard but not as hard as having to design an infinitely flexible system that has to account for an infinite number of unknown variables.

If I was good at marketing I would know that I should be building the Squid In A Box brand identity and associating it with a specific genre of game. Squid In A Box would be the developer that makes crazy neon shooters.

It’s probably a good job then that I’m terrible at marketing.

My policy has always been to make the games that I want to play and right now I don’t want to play Waves 2: the Wavening. Nope right now I want to play a turn based RPG with online co-op and procedurally generated dungeons so that’s what I’m making.

With this in mind I have spent the last couple of weeks working on a prototype of such a game. You saw the first stage with the “Blue Fire Dawn” tech demo that had a ball rolling around a procedurally generated maze. Well this has taken it a step further and now there are Space Marines Vs Angry Robots in a turn-based fight to the death.